Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: plain the practice, often to be seen, of alloAving wornout land to rest for a while after a long period of mismanagement has exhausted its fertility. The success of this expedient, however, does not justify the practice, which is obviously most wasteful both of time and means. The amount of active fertility in the soil ought, by a judicious system of cropping and consumption on the farm, to be made nearly to reproduce itself year by year; and the gradual development of that which lies dormant, instead of acting as a sinking fund to wipe out the evils of past mismanagement would then go annually to increase the fertility of the land. CHAPTER IV. IMPROVEMENT OF SOILS. — DRAINAGE AND IRRIGATION. Land-Drainage—objects, process, results, expense and profit.—Irrigation —object aimed at, methods adopted, results.—Sewage irrigation. Land DrainagC.—Whatever the composition or natural, capability of a soil, its fertility depends materially upon its relations to the water which falls upon it. If the rainwater has free access throughout it, free passage through it, not only are ingredients added which the roots absorb for the nourishment of the plant, but these ingredients are available in the laboratory of the soil for those purposes by which plant food is manufactured from the material of soil itself and from the manure added to it; and, above all, the full use is obtained of a necessary carrier of plant food by the hungry mouths—the absorbent ends of root-fibres to which it must be brought. Upon the permeability, as well as on the composition of a soil, its fertility is thus very materially dependent; and land drainage, either natural or artificial, is essential to it. When there is ffn excess of water in a soil, and no provision exists for withdrawing it, the interstitia...